Sustainability at Kroger

As America’s grocer, Kroger is committed to advancing positive change in our company and our communities to protect people and our planet. Through Kroger’s Zero Hunger | Zero Waste social impact plan, we are on a journey to end hunger in the places we call home and eliminate waste across our company by 2025. We have ambitious sustainability goals for 2020, thoughtful plans to drive innovation, strong partnerships and committed associates. Together, we live Our Purpose – to Feed the Human Spirit? – every day.

Sustainable Supply Chain

Our customers and stakeholders want to know more about the food they eat – where it comes from and how it’s made. They all want to feel good about our choices. As one of the world’s largest retailers, Kroger focuses on improving transparency in our supply chain, from sourcing sustainable raw ingredients and fresh products to advancing fair labor practices and animal welfare.

High-Impact Commodities

High-impact commodities are products that have the potential for greater social, environmental or economic impacts because of where and how they are produced or processed. Kroger actively looks for opportunities to influence positive change in our supply chain – examples include seafood, cocoa, palm oil, conflict minerals and flowers.
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Leading in Fair Trade Products

Kroger’s Simple Truth? and Simple Truth Organic? brand has more Fair Trade-certified products than any other U.S. private label brand. By the end of 2018, we carried 56 certified products, spanning multiple commodity categories, and we purchased more than 17.17 million pounds of certified ingredients.

Our Products

Kroger is quickly becoming a top destination when customers are looking for affordable and accessible organic and natural foods. We offer thousands of natural, organic and eco-friendly product choices to meet our customers’ needs and preferences for their families and homes.
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The Simple Truth?

We offer thousands of natural, organic and eco-friendly product choices to meet our customers’ needs and preferences for their families and homes. Our natural and organics brand, Simple Truth?, reached $2.3 billion in annual sales in 2018. These items have clearly defined product standards, including being “free from” 101 artificial preservatives and ingredients. We offer more than 1,550 unique Simple Truth? or Simple Truth Organic? products across a wide variety of categories.

Eco-Stewardship

Kroger is committed to improving sustainability – using natural resources responsibly, reducing the impact of our operations and eliminating waste. Read more about how we are improving Eco-Stewardship in our 2020 Sustainability Goals progress update. We focus our work on waste reduction and diversion, reducing our energy and climate impacts, and increasing water efficiency.

Generating Renewable Power

In late 2017, Kroger started up an anaerobic wastewater treatment system at the KB Specialty Foods manufacturing facility in Greensburg, Ind. The system will turn food production byproducts into energy and improve air quality in the area. At maximum capacity, the digester can generate up to 30% of the plant’s power.

Zero Waste

As part of Zero Hunger | Zero Waste, Kroger is committed to eliminating waste across our company by 2025. In 2018, we continued to advance progress on our goal by reducing and recovering more waste and increasing the adoption of circular models in our operations. As a result of our associates’ hard work, we diverted 76% of waste from landfill, company-wide. Our work has also focused on driving innovation: last year, we made the commitment to phase out single-use plastic bags in our stores and we announced our partnership with Loop, the new e-commerce platform that employs durable packaging.

Energy Efficiency

Reducing our carbon footprint is an important pillar in Kroger’s sustainability commitment, and we continue to invest in energy efficiency and low-carbon technologies. Increasing energy efficiency, reducing refrigerant emissions and using more renewable energy are key areas of focus.

Zero Hunger | Zero Waste

Eliminating waste across our company – achieving Zero Waste – is a top priority for Kroger. We follow the food waste hierarchy, focusing on preventing waste first, then feeding people, feeding animals, recycling and composting the rest. We believe we can make a meaningful difference to America’s hunger and waste problem.

Eliminating waste across our company – achieving Zero Waste – is a top priority for Kroger. We follow the food waste hierarchy, focusing on preventing waste first, then feeding people, feeding animals, recycling and composting the rest. We believe we can make a meaningful difference to America’s hunger and waste problem.

We set high quality and performance standards for all Our Brands products, whether we make them ourselves or use a third-party supplier. In order to do business with Kroger, a supplier is required to agree to our Vendor Code of Conduct, which can be found here. We have a zero tolerance policy for human rights violations. If suppliers (or their suppliers) do not live up to our Code, we will not do business with them.

By 2020, Kroger expects to save 52.5 million gallons of water annually through its new initiative to reduce water waste in Starbucks kiosks located in select stores. Easy but effective fixes like this one are helping Kroger move towards its goal to reduce water consumption in stores by 5% by 2020.

As a result of projects such as our multi-year LED lighting retrofit, Kroger’s retail group has now achieved—and surpassed—our goal to achieve 40% electricity savings ahead of schedule: By 2018, we achieved a 44.9% savings. Through this goal, we have saved over 2 billion kWh in our stores since 2000.

Kroger is committed to increasing the sustainability of Our Brands product packaging. Our key priorities include reducing unnecessary packaging, increasing the recyclability of our packaging and increasing the amount of recycled content in our packaging — while supporting our communities in building better recycling infrastructure and giving our customers options for recycling. By 2018, we had achieved more than 9.1 million pounds of plastic reductions in Our Brands packaging, including our 1-gallon milk jug.